Tuesday, November 06, 2007

How Good (or Lame) is the New USCF Site?

Over at BCC, a post about Jack Le Moine's experiences at the recent USCF Executive Board meeting produces an extended run of comments about how bad the USCF's new website sucks. I noticed the other day that when I tried to link to USCF player pages it didn't work, and now I know why.

Luckily, "Dan" provides a link to the old pages at http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrLst.php. Hope it lasts, because I loved to link to my and my opponent's tournament records when talking about a game or event, and they managed to screw that feature up by putting it all inside a "wrapper." Otherwise, I don't have anything against the new page, but it doesn't really seem like an improvement, either, so why make the change?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Robert, I don't know what you think, but I think the coloring is totally lame. I feel like I'm in a nursery or something.

It's true I didn't any kids crying or anything, but perhaps I wasn't listening...

Anonymous said...

I was going to mention the coloring as well. It's absolutely dreadful. A monochromatic scheme can work, but this particular execution isn't any good.

I don't remember the old site well (fairly recently got back into chess).

Anonymous said...

I don't know the old site either as I started to play chess relatively recently. However, I don't think that it is that bad. As somebody who decided to run a chess blog/website myself I know that it takes a lot of time to get everything running and nothing will be perfect from the start. People have different tastes and personal preferences on how they use computers so there will be always many people who want changes. As for the color scheme, why not having people vote on it or give the possiblity to choose one? Most modern content management systems allow this and I am sure colophon can do this, too. Then there is at least no dispute over the colors.

And after all, it is content that (should) rule. And in general I like the content of the site.